The system forms the core battle mechanics and offers a tremendous amount of freedom for players and increased the game’s strategic element greatly. For example, junctioning an offensive spell to your strength attribute will make characters hit much harder, while junctioning a curative spell to your health attribute will boost HP. This let you pull out magic spells from the environment, items, and enemies, and essentially ‘equip’ them to boost various stats. We also developed the Draw & Junction system. As I mentioned, we wanted to try new things with the game – you’ll notice that it’s full of unconventional mechanics.įor example, instead of receiving Gil by killing enemies, you instead receive it as a salary at regular intervals. While we worked on the cutscenes, we were also busy overhauling many of the traditional mechanics of the Final Fantasy series. The team pulled together to make that happen and that unity was reflected in the final product.
The team also understood that our ambition of blending gameplay and cutscenes meant that the new game’s scenes needed to be higher quality than before.
Final Fantasy VIII was the second game we made with that team structure, and our proficiency had definitely improved. We created a CG production team for Final Fantasy VII and attempted to merge it with the conventional game team. Part of the reason for this was experience. The game features multiple moments where you are able to move around the scene while the CG cutscene played, and we were able to get to a place where these in-game models appeared more naturally within these moments. We worked very hard on improving this for Final Fantasy VIII. There were parts of Final Fantasy VII where the cutscenes and real-time polygon characters looked out of place – for example, there were inconsistencies in the character proportions and polygon quality between scenes. We wanted to fuse game scenes and cutscenes together, but the implementation wasn’t exactly how we wanted it. While I’m proud of what we were able to achieve, that game represented something of a transition period for us in how we used the technology. We used 3D CG scenes for the first time in Final Fantasy VII – I wrote about this at PlayStation Blog earlier this year. One area in which we innovated was the implementation of CG cutscenes.
Blurring the line between CG and gameplay
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